Rex Murphy: Imagination has no gender. Language has no sex

A cat — a great, hairy, seriously heterosexual guy cat — has been released among the literary pigeons. The rogue feline in question is none other than writer David Gilmour, a Governor-General Award winner and a professor of English at the University of Toronto.

In an interview posted on the Random House website, best-selling author and University of Toronto Literary Studies professor David Gilmour stated that he is “not interested” in teaching female novelists, because he prefers to teach the writers who “I truly, truly love.” And the writers he truly loves happen to be “serious heterosexual guys.”

Love of the writers one teaches is a good basis for a syllabus. But since Gilmour also claims that he teaches “only the best,” the obvious conclusion to draw is that he thinks female writers are inferior to male writers. His grudging acceptance of Virginia Woolf as the sole female writer he considers worthy to join his personal pantheon, ironically, only adds fuel to the fire his remarks have stirred up.

In an interview published this week, Gilmour ever-so-gleefully insisted that he doesn’t teach books written by female writers; that he only teaches the “people he truly loves, none of whom happen to be Chinese or women” (a curious pairing); and that he “only teaches the best,” a formulation that implicitly equates “best” with “male” (except for Virginia Woolf, whom Gilmour calls out by name as an exception to his rule).

That’s a lot of literary birdshot to spray in a single chat-blast. Mr. Gilmour has landed himself into a War and Peace of his own invention.

There are many problems with what he said. Some flow from his own incoherence. For example, he teaches Marcel Proust. (“One of my great joys is not only having read Proust, but having read him twice,” he told his interviewer.) But placing Proust in the “seriously heterosexual” camp would do great violence to heterosexuality, seriousness and, possibly, even the very concept of camp.

And then there’s Tolstoy, whom I admire as much as does Gilmour. But to this day, I have never imagined the great Russian seer as a Charlie Sheen of the Russian steppe. There’s a whole lot more to Tolstoy than testosterone.

Yet these are mere blips of inconsistency, which is what we expect from fiction writers. It is the larger thrust of his comments — the whole project of organizing writers into sexual categories — that is truly worrying and absurd.

I remember reading Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, and in particular the speech addressed to the shade of Helen of Troy: (“Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium / Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss”), as well as the transcendent soliloquy of Faustus before he was fetched by Mephistopheles. I remember thinking then, as now I do, that here was the height of English poetry — scenes and phrases rivaling Shakespeare himself.

I care not a whit that ‘George Eliot’ was a woman, or wrote under a masculine pseudonym

I did not know then that Christopher Marlowe was a homosexual. Now I know and do not care. It has not changed the hymn to Helen or the golden words preceding Faustus’ descent into Hell.

Likewise, when now I re-read Middlemarch, I care not a whit that “George Eliot” was a woman, or wrote under a masculine pseudonym; or to go even further down a pointless path, that she conducted an adulterous relationship for a good part of her life.

‘Tis not that’s she’s she or he — it’s how well, how artistically she wrote. I am as indifferent to her biology as I am to Marlowe’s sexual habits.

I also don’t care that James Joyce was a neurotic obsessive, or that T.S. Eliot (now this is shocking!) worked in a bank. For the latter, it’s Prufrock, The Waste Land and Four Quartets that cable all my attention. For the rest of it, I could not care less if he spent wild weekends in the Caucasus at orgies with various animal life.

And in Macbeth, recall, Shakespeare wrote that image of “pity, like a naked newborn babe,” one of the great similes of all time. Yet he was neither a mother nor an infant.

But enough of instances.

Language has no genitals, thank Zeus

The point is that imagination has no gender. Language has no sex. Creativity is a human gift and it chooses its own vessels. Literature is its own category. To impose upon it exterior and adventitious categories — male, female, colonial, queer, etc. — is an error and an impertinence.

Teach the words, professors. Show why they are beautiful.

If we teach the power and beauty of language, the miracle of inspired utterance from the minds of the makers, from Homer to Nabokov, from Sappho to Sylvia Plath, we will have no time — and less inclination — to find out which ideological or sexual filigree attaches to the authors.

To be blunt, Mr. Gilmour is, insofar as this deplorably cant term has any meaning, sexist: He does betray an obsessive concern for the horny male novel. That’s his petard. He assembled it, and has with brilliant acrobatics hoisted himself on it. But many of his feminist critics are on a petard of their own making, too: Touting writers because they are females is but Gilmourism in lace and high heels.

Language has no genitals, thank Zeus. The next time he grants an interview, Mr. Gilmour should park his at the door.

In the wake of a Grammy Awards ceremony that disappointed many, from Kanye West to the masses on Twitter lamenting the state of pop music, a historical perspective is key. Few are better poised to offer one than Andy Kim.